शमशेर सिंह बिष्ट के जन्मदिन पर विशेष : सुनो उस  राजा की कहानी | पास ना जिसके  घोड़ा  पालकी ना थी राजधानी 

Corporatising Agriculture - Not just Adani, Global Capital

Corporatising Agriculture and Foreign Investors -Farmer-owned Sahyadri Farms has raised Rs 310 crore from a group of European investors By Jayashree Bhosale Sep 14, 2022,  https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/company/corporate-trends/farmer-owned-sahyadri-farms-has-raised-rs-310-crore-from-a-group-of-european-investors/articleshow/94202814.cms  Foreign investment story of Sahyadri FPO is now become the discussion points amongst all of us mainly in the development and FPO sector.

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South-Up. The South as New Political Imaginary

Bharat Jodo Yatra has opened room for new imagination of India — ‘South-up’  Yogendra Yadav 14 September, 2022 https://theprint.in/opinion/bharat-jodo-yatra-has-opened-room-for-new-imagination-of-india-south-up/1127886/ If we have to resist majoritarianism, we must turn to the three ideological pillars of Dravidian politics: Regionalism, rationalism, and social justice in new ways.

Professor G. N. Devy has a name for this imagination: Dakshinayan. It is the name of the movement he started with many other writers in 2016. We were lucky that he had also come for the inauguration of the yatra and was there with us at the breakfast table that morning. Over idli sambhar and a good cup of my favourite South Indian filter coffee, he explained to us the concept and the story of Dakshinayan. You must hear from him the story of how his wife Surekha and he shifted their home from Vadodara in Gujarat to Dharwad in Karnataka to be with the wife of Professor M. M. Kalburgi after he was assassinated by Right-wing forces. Professor Devy was attracted to the dual significance of Dakshinayan: Its southern orientation as opposed to the north orientation of ‘uttarayan’, and also as a political metaphor for the times when days are short and nights long.  ( see also Ganesh Devy Dakshinayan Samas 2018 Sevagram  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B68TesJA7dM

Extract from Corrine Kumar:   The south as the new political imaginery

To all those who listen to the Song of the Wind:

In a different place, in a different time, Black Elk heard the Song of the Wind

I saw myself on the central mountain of the world, the highest place, and I had a vision because I was seeing in the sacred manner of the world, she said

Remember she said, she was seeing in the sacred manner of the world

And the sacred, central mountain was a mountain in her part of the world

“But,” Black Elk continued to say: “the central mountain is everywhere”

From my central mountain, the point where stillness and movement are together, I invite you to listen to the wind;

more specially to the wind from the South: the South as third world, as the civilizations of Asia, the Pacific, the Arab world, Africa, Latin America; the South as the voices and movements of peoples, wherever these movements exist; the South as the visions and wisdoms of women: the South as the discovering of new paradigms, which challenge the existing theoretical concepts and categories breaking the mind constructs, seeking a new language to describe what it perceives, refusing the one, objective, rational, scientific world view as the only world view: the South as the discovery of other cosmologies, as the discovery of other knowledges that have been hidden, submerged, silenced. The South as an “insurrection of these subjugated knowledges”

The South as history; the South as mystery

The South as the finding of new political paradigms, inventing new political patterns, creating alternative political imaginations: the South as the revelation of each civilization in its own idiom: the South as conversations between civilizations:

The South then as new universalisms

And in our searching for new understandings of the South, it promises to bring to the world new meanings, new moorings.

It invites us to create a new imaginary to birth a new cosmology;

The South then as new political imaginary

Yogendra Yadav

Cognitive biases and brain biology help explain why facts don’t change minds

We should be careful when we make memes and comments. They may tend to distance the person rather than convince them.

https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/facts-dont-change-minds/ Cognitive biases and brain biology help explain why facts don’t change minds September 4, 2022
For many people, a challenge to their worldview feels like an attack on their personal identity.

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Bid to delegitimised Social Movements

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiJDvgPusco  बदनामी और हमले कर सरकार जन-आंदोलनों को रोकना चाहती है" मेधा पाटकर से बातचीत
 Sep 4, 2022    This tirade against social movements is to cement vote bank. part of elections.. 

Medha Patkar was wrong on Narmada project https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/Swaminomics/medha-patkar-was-wrong-on-narmada-project/ September 4, 2022, Patkar said all micro-level struggles are key to building a macro-level agitation that questions the very paradigm of development at all levels. “Chunikaka said gaon ki zamin, gaon ki hai — but is it happening now? Do the villagers have control over the jal, jungle, zameen being given away to the corporate sector, the mining mafia? Where is the three-tier Panchayati Raj system?” Patkar said, and added there “is no alternative to people’s movements.”

When Narendra Modi Exhorted 'Andolanjivis' to Rise Up Against the Government in 1974 https://thewire.in/politics/narendra-modi-andolanjivis-protest-1974-message  A message written by the prime minister in his 20s provides valuable advice to the protesters of today but also represents the drastic swing in his opinion of protests. The Modi government’s second term has faced pan-India protests opposing controversial policy decisions such as the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the three farm laws.

‘Yes, We Are Andolanjeevi, You Have Forced Us’: Medha Patkar  https://thewire.in/rights/andolanjeevi-medha-patkar-sardar-sarovar-narmada-project-dam-water-crisis 
'Today’s centralised policies are pushing the marginalised communities further to the margins, squeezing all options for the poor but to take to the streets.'

“No Alternative to People’s Movements,” Says Internationally Acclaimed Human Rights Activist Medha Patkar

 https://indiatomorrow.net/2021/12/22/no-alternative-to-peoples-movements-says-internationally-acclaimed-human-rights-activist-medha-patkar/  December 22, 2021 -  In a sharp snub to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘andolanjeevi’ taunt at those leading people’s movements in the country, the firebrand activist declared in her true inimitable style, “Yes, we are andolanjeevi because today’s centralized policies are pushing the marginalized communities further to the margins, squeezing all options for the poor but to take to the streets.”

In another pointed rebuff on the charges levelled by the present government about NGOs receiving foreign funds, Patkar retorted, “They allege we receive foreign funding for our agitations while I had returned even my award money, but there is huge money coming into the country to implement the so-called PPP (Private-Public-Partnership) model policies.”

Launching a frontal attack, she questioned, “How much foreign funds came into the PM Cares Fund and for disaster management? Where is it?”

According to Patkar, the government, on the one hand, claimed had no money for the tribals, the landless, the poor, and the farmers. “But this very government has money for Central Vista, for Sardar Patel statue and waiving of corporate NPAs to the tune of Rs68,000cr.”  

The Making of Kishore Saint..

Kishore Saint was groomed in oral tradition by his grandmother in punjabi tradition as well as mid eastern folklore. He schooled in a Madrasa, and Convent and a Gurukul. More importantly being on the other side of the border, he was in the midst of the partition riots on both sides of the border. As a student and then a teacher in Kenya and in the UK, in the midst of the 60s youth movements, he felt the yearning for public work and the call to come back to India. This he says in his own words in this segment.  https://youtu.be/QnD1KajyMgI 

Now that an Adivasi is president, will Big Media finally report on Adivasi issues?

Now that an Adivasi is president, will Big Media finally report on Adivasi issues?  By Kalpana Sharma 28 Jul, 2022 https://www.newslaundry.com/2022/07/28/now-that-an-adivasi-is-president-will-big-media-finally-report-on-adivasi-issues
Droupadi Murmu’s election should be more than a temporary news peg, given most readers and viewers know nothing of Adivasi struggles or culture...
One of the reasons for this was the inability of jailed Adivasis to get adequate legal support. JagLAG, a group that did provide such support, was hounded out of Bastar.

Apart from Bastar, which comes into view whenever there is a so-called “encounter” between security forces and Maoists, there are struggles being waged by Adivasi groups in many other parts of the country, including Murmu’s home state of Odisha. Remember the extraordinary campaign by the Dongria Kondh tribe in Niyamgiri against the bauxite mine of the powerful business house Vedanta? Despite their success, their problems have not ended yet. Similar struggles continue in Jharkhand where local communities are challenging either infrastructure or the release of their lands for mining. Yet there is little written about these struggles except in alternative or non-mainstream media.

How can any media do this given the power the State has to intimidate media houses through their business interests?

How, given the latest Supreme Court ruling on the Prevention of Money Laundering Act and the enhanced powers of the Enforcement Directorate, can any media house attempting to be “independent” or even “honest” survive in a regime where such laws and the ED have been weaponised to deal with all kinds of dissidence?

And finally how, when even those “independent” journalists who are doing their jobs of gathering facts and reporting them are either arrested, as in the recent case of Mohammed Zubair and earlier Siddique Kappan or Kashmiri journalists Asif Sultan, Fahad Shah and Sajad Gul? Or they are stopped from pursuing their professional commitments, as in the recent case of Aakash Hassan, a Kashmiri journalist stopped from going on a reporting assignment to Sri Lanka, and earlier the Pulitzer prize winning Kashmiri photographer Sana Irshad Mattoo, who was not permitted to board a flight to Paris without being given any reason.

Solpa Aarey Adjust Maadi

This is what will happen to the new area marked for the metro in aarey.  This is the south east of Aarey.

The central portion was given for the SRP camp. And because of the high tension wire the electricity dept got controll of the forests under the power lines, Now they have their offices. Of course the property is now privatised after Addani took over the electricity distribution, for which they have their office space touching the highway to the west.. Now the tall buildings in the centre come up to replace the lowly structures as soon as the new privatised airport, changes the directions of their main take off funnel..and allows tall building in the non-tunnel area which cuts across aarey, making it a prime location for development, SRA, future premium buildings etc. The tall buildings on the right of this picture is in a location which was 'alienated' for a children's park and housed a huge amusement party till just two decades ago. The park was closed down as it was not financially viable and low and behold the oberoi buildings have come up and continue to come up along the south side of the original aarey left lung of Mumbai.
 The west side ie from where this picture in taken was carved out for a transit camp, which became permanent and went in for MHADA redevelopment.

Segment as seen in google maps

And this is what is look from the other side today..

(Pix-Aarey Conservation Group )

Where is the Laxman Rekha? Can we draw one now?

Esther Duflo

Esther Duflo: Nobel Prize banquet speech Dec 16, 2019  https://youtu.be/JjE6ZK8vvcE?t=46 

Poverty..

The British Academy @BritishAcademy_ https://twitter.com/BritishAcademy_/status/1544344123037339648
"Duflo believes that politicians could implement ambitious climate action without provoking public dissent by making it part of a wider programme of wealth redistribution."

https://www.newstatesman.com/encounter/2022/06/esther-duflo-climate-change-is-a-problem-from-hell-politically

Esther Duflo: Social experiments to fight poverty

Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee | After Poor Economics
55,163 views Sep 26, 2017 A radical rethinking of the way to fight global poverty.
Abhijit Banerjee 7:45
Esther Duflo 32:00

https://www.ubscenter.uzh.ch/en/news_...

For more than fifteen years the founders of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, Abhijit Banerjee (MIT) and Esther Duflo (MIT), have worked with the poor in dozens of countries spanning five continents, trying to understand the specific problems that come with poverty and to find proven solutions. Through a careful analysis of a very rich body of evidence, including the hundreds of randomized control trials that Banerjee and Duflo’s lab has pioneered, they show why the poor, despite having the same desires and abilities as anyone else, end up with entirely different lives. Their mission is to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by scientific evidence.

https://www.povertyactionlab.org

This keynote lecture was made possible by the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich alongside its partners UBS Center for Economics in Society and Swiss Re

Google Is Not What It Seems by Julian Assange

Google Is Not What It Seems by Julian Assange https://archive.ph/UDDBC#selection-693.93-693.365

Since at least the 1970s, authentic actors like unions and churches have folded under a sustained assault by free-market statism, transforming “civil society” into a buyer’s market for political factions and corporate interests looking to exert influence at arm’s length.

The civil society conference circuit—which flies developing-world activists across the globe hundreds of times a year to bless the unholy union between “government and private stakeholders” at geopoliticized events like the “Stockholm Internet Forum”—simply could not exist if it were not blasted with millions of dollars in political funding annually.

Nobody wants to acknowledge that Google has grown big and bad. But it has. Schmidt’s tenure as CEO saw Google integrate with the shadiest of US power structures as it expanded into a geographically invasive megacorporation. But Google has always been comfortable with this proximity. Long before company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin hired Schmidt in 2001, their initial research upon which Google was based had been partly funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).48 And even as Schmidt’s Google developed an image as the overly friendly giant of global tech, it was building a close relationship with the intelligence community.

As the self-described “radical centrist”65 New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote in 1999, sometimes it is not enough to leave the global dominance of American tech corporations to something as mercurial as “the free market”:

The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.66

If the future of the internet is to be Google, that should be of serious concern to people all over the world—in Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, the former Soviet Union, and even in Europe—for whom the internet embodies the promise of an alternative to US cultural, economic, and strategic hegemony.71

A “don’t be evil” empire is still an empire.